IWM14 Publicising your site

How will anyone find your site? Going public Host Domain name Search engines Getting noticed Rising higher

Finding a host your ISP, e.g. NTL Home, BT Internet, AOL – will do this on small scale but will give you an uninteresting name Get round this via domain forwarding – submit your domain name to service, who will forward to your ISP-hosted site

Finding a domain name Find a name registration service or just put “buy domain name UK” into Google range?.co.uk.com,.org..eu.info..biz price? pgpic.co.uk = £20.56/£5.78 (2yrs) pgpic.com = £41/£17.98 any sensible names are quickly snapped up

Finding a host find a web hosting service – they keep your site on their server, give you connected facilities, give use statistics you pay a sum per month/year your host will capture download requests from visitors to your domain name and direct them to the correct place on the server (different URL/IP address)

Getting noticed Search Engine Submission: Getting Listed Search Engine Optimization: Improving The Odds Search Engine Placement & Positioning: Ranking Well Search Engine Marketing & Promotion: The Overall Process

Crawler or directory? Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found. If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Crawler or directory? A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted. Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing.

Crawler plus directory? It’s now common for both types of results to be presented together. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favour one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from LookSmart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.

Crawler plus human? Some search engines complement crawler based results with human filtering, e.g. BBCi, which uses Google results plus BBC editors

How does a crawler work? Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

How does a crawler work? Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index is a database containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, the database is updated with new information.

How does a crawler work? Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed -- added to the index -- it is not available to those searching with the search engine.

How does a crawler work? Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. See for details of differences in search engine algorithms

Getting noticed - listing  Getting listed in directories, e.g. Yahoo, About.com (only for substantial sites though)  Can submit non-commercial sites to Yahoo for free (but may take several weeks for decision on listing)  Find most appropriate category/region and click on "suggest a site”  Take careful note of submission instructions  Can pay for Sponsored Listing to move up list (paid placement) or Paid inclusion to get place in database

Getting noticed by search engine software Use TITLE and meta tags KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION TITLE - should match the user's search terms, e.g. Ethics of Computing,Brighton photographers, Geography Department, Manchester United (are these assumptions correct?) Can be quite long words). Only first few words are displayed. Alphabetical order may count for title, so use Aardvark not Zebra

Meta-tags How To Use HTML Meta Tags <meta NAME="description" CONTENT="This tutorial explains how to use HTML meta tags, with links to meta tag generators and builders. From SearchEngineWatch.com, a guide to search engine submission and registration."> In Composer – Page Properties

Meta-tags

Getting noticed Craft KEYWORDS carefully. Use the keywords your users will think of, not "tricks" like Britney Spears (aka keyword spamming) Don't use multiples of keywords (e.g. Brighton Brighton Brighton Brighton) Use synonyms and alternative spellings, e.g. colour/color, optimize/optimise

Getting noticed If you use frames, give them title and meta tags. Some search engines ignore frames in sites Put some of your keywords into the page text near the top of the page - this may also be indexed by some search engines. But don't make it a list of keywords, as it may be displayed in search results and scare people off.

Getting noticed If appropriate, use popular search terms, found e.g. at searchterms.com Some people recommend key phrases not words, e.g. visiting clematis gardens in Sussex Get linked to from other domains (ask them). Your site will bask in their popularity

Top terms

Getting noticed Craft DESCRIPTION carefully - take "strings" into account, e.g. educational Make sure description includes key words

Encourage clicking DESCRIPTION is normally what appears on search engine lists and will influence users to click or not. Should be 3 lines or so that reads as flowing prose - max. 50 Sensible TITLE also helps encourage clicking Having a meaningful domain name helps: Inspires more confidence Doesn't tie you to ISP Some search engines won't list ISP-based names

Encourage returners Don't scare people off with redirecting, "shadow domains” Don't prevent deep linking (e.g. via robots.txt file - (see for details) Give sensible page titles for bookmark files

Find out more about visitors Track your visitors (but not with visible visitor counter) - where did they come from which page do they enter by new/returning what do click trails look like what search terms did they use where in the world are they

Find out more WebMonkey and SearchEngineWatch the search engines themselves reverse engineer sites resembling yours